O, the joy of these days
Two nights
ago I was tired enough to decide that I wanted to upgrade my
system. See, this shouldn't be much of an issue — I
do that pretty regularly, random packages are automatically
upgraded to the newest versions in Debian testing, nothing
changes too much, and life is good.
Most of the time.
That night was one of the times that make the previous
phrase start with "most of" and not "all".
What I typically do is launch an aptitude
upgrade and go to sleep. Which is what I did on that
fatidical night. Hilarity ensued the following morning when
I got a mail from my early cvsup cronjob, which succintly said
Segmentation fault
"Bah", I said to myself. "Something unexpected must have
happened. Care not, because I will run it by hand and all
will be well". How ingenuous of me; because when I ran it
by hand, not all was well at all! Quite the opposite in
fact. I got the same
Segmentation fault
But I surely can fix this little annoyance, can't I?
"Sure I can", I eased myself. "I'll just run the crasher
under GDB and quickly discover the failure". My ingenuity
was still blinding me. Reality struck not long after that:
$ gdb cvsup
(gdb) run -g cvsup.pgsql
Starting program: /home/alvherre/bin/cvsup -g cvsup.pgsql
warning: Lowest section in system-supplied DSO at 0xffffe000
is .hash at ffffe0b4
(no debugging symbols found)
[repeated about 15 times]
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0xf7285578 in ?? ()
(gdb) bt
#0 0xf7285578 in
?? ()Cannot access memory at address 0xf86cd0
If I have ever seen a more useless
backtrace, it must have been in a previous life.
Of course, this cvsup binary was compiled in a machine
that I no longer
have, the compiler itself is hard to find, let alone
compile, so generating
anew cvsup binary is probably out of the question; or at
least, it will take a
very long while to do.
So here I am, pondering whether I should instead try to
run this binary in
ai386 Sarge chroot jail that I have lying around (which I
use for those
peskyAdobe Flash wannabee-webapps), waste my time trying to
get a new CVSup
binary, orjust give up and start using rsync to fetch the
Postgres repository
instead.
And it promised to be such a lovely, cold, fire-enjoying
morn.
It must have been one of those days I should have stayed
in bed,
becauselater I had to go out to deliver a letter (yes, that
dead tree stuff
that makes you go out somewhere and pass it by hand to
someone else to take
care of); a matter of minutes, I said, so I grabbed my bike
and pedaled all the
way to the bus stop; chained the bike, delivered thestuff
quickly and as I went
back to unchain the bike ... the key broke in the lock. So
I had to walk home,
get my pliers, walk back, and dissassemble the lock.
Thiswas a matter of a
minute or two (not including the walks), after which I felt
really safe
about that lock. Of course, I trashed it.
So I think Mother Nature must be against me for some
reason. And I think
Iknow why: it's probably because I haven't been taking any
photos. And
whywould that be, you might ask? And I might answer: it is
because last
friday,as we were going out for the Holden concert, I
dropped the bag where I
keep my camera — and no! You don't need to guess. I
probably went pale
for abit, but there was no one there with another camera to
take a picture of
the event. Colors returned to my face as I observed that
the only thing that
hadbroken was the UV filter. But still, no one sells UV
filters in this little
city, nor anyphotographic equipment at all really. So I'm
stuck without photos
until I can getsomewhere civilized, where they do have stores.
Now, you would say all these things are not really all
that much of a
problem. And you might even be right. What's more, I would
have agreed! So,
not havingenough problems, yesterday night I decided that I
wanted to upgrade
the old fashionedGaim to the new, shiny, non-patent-encumbered,
non-trademark-infringing Pidgin. After the process, which
was pretty quick, I
restarted the thing in order tohave better icons to look at.
And now the
problem comes — because after the upgrade, Ican't
connect to either
jabber.commandprompt.com or jabber.postgresql.org. For all
intents and
purposes, I'm offline.
So this morning I started a good fire first thing after
waking up, just to
make sure that cold won't be a problem today. Because there
will be others
— I am sure. And I will leave the camera at home and
stay very far away
from it so that it doesn't suffer any more damage.